Written By Lucien Drake
There’s a moment early on in Amen where your brain tries to orient itself, to decide what kind of album this is going to be and fails completely. That failure isn’t an accident. It’s the point.
Amen doesn’t open like a metal album so much as an invocation. Choirs loom, ecclesiastical and ominous, evoking the same uneasy sacred dread that haunted the original Omen soundtrack.
It feels liturgical, ritualistic, wrong in a way that suggests reverence is about to be violated rather than upheld. From the outset, Igorrr establishes a central tension that runs through the entire record: the collision of order and disruption, tradition and sabotage.
What follows is not chaos in the lazy sense, but controlled instability. Gautier Serre isn’t throwing genres at the wall to see what sticks. He’s deliberately setting up familiar structures. Classical piano, choral arrangements, classical guitar and even hints of rockabilly and then dismantling them mid-thought.
Songs don’t evolve so much as they snap, shedding identities and reemerging as something else entirely.
Piano passages fracture into percussive violence. Choirs loom until they feel oppressive. Electronics don’t decorate the compositions; they rewire them from the inside.
Several tracks begin with an almost deceptive sense of calm. Piano-led openings and classical guitar passages feel like moments of resistance and composure until they’re interrupted.
In “Headbutt,” the piano doesn’t gently guide the song forward; it gets attacked. Those percussive strikes sound less like playing and more like fists coming down on the keys, frustration made audible.
When metal finally arrives, it doesn’t feel like a transition. It feels like a psychological break. The effect is unsettling in a way that’s hard to shake, less theatrical madness and more institutional unease like wandering through different rooms of a mental asylum, each governed by its own logic.
This pattern repeats across the album, not as repetition but as methodology. Amen constantly presents you with something recognizable, then corrupts it.
Classical elements don’t soothe, they destabilize. Choirs don’t uplift, they loom. Electronics push and pull at the songs until they feel elastic, stretched between genres without ever settling long enough to become comfortable.
Every track feels like it could belong to a completely different band operating under a completely different set of rules and yet the album never collapses into randomness. There’s intent behind every rupture.
One of the most striking things about Amen is how much of its identity is driven by its electronic architecture. The electronics aren’t background texture or seasoning; they’re the nervous system of the record. They’re what allow each song to mutate so dramatically without losing cohesion.
Metal is present throughout, often heavy, often masculine, often brutal but it’s rarely allowed to dominate for long. Just when a riff feels established, the ground shifts again.
And yet, for all its density and aggression, Amen does something that many extreme records fail to do: it sticks.
Beneath the brutality and constant reinvention, there are hooks, real ones. The kind that don’t announce themselves immediately, but burrow in slowly.
On repeated listens, favorites migrate. The obvious entry points burn hot and fast, while subtler tracks begin to assert themselves over time. Details surface. Rhythms linger. Melodies you didn’t clock on first contact start pulling focus.
That’s how you know this album has depth. Records that are only impressive flatten quickly. Records with longevity rearrange themselves in your head. Amen rewards patience, repetition, and full attention. It punishes passive listening, but it gives back generously if you stay with it.
There’s also an unexpected sense of play here. Moments of absurdity, genre whiplash, and sonic provocation that prevent the album from collapsing under its own seriousness.
But unlike novelty driven experimentation, these moments feel integrated rather than distracting. Even when Amen is at its most bizarre, it never feels like it’s winking at the listener.
There’s no irony here, no sense of trying to prove cleverness. The album commits fully to its own internal logic, however fractured that logic may seem from the outside.
Ultimately, Amen isn’t strange for the sake of being strange. It’s strange because it refuses to resolve. It’s heavy, aggressive and meticulously constructed but it’s also eclectic, diverse, and genuinely exciting in a way that’s become rare.
This is cutting-edge metal not because it’s extreme, but because it still feels unstable. Like it could fall apart or transform at any moment.
You either connect with that restlessness, or you don’t. But if you do, Amen delivers something increasingly uncommon: a physical response. Chills. An endorphin rush. That involuntary jolt that reminds you why you still chase new music after all these years.
I didn’t just respect this album, I wanted to keep listening.
And that, more than extremity or innovation alone, is what makes Amen truly exciting.
Amen Track Listing
01. Daemoni
02. Headbutt
03. Limbo
04. Blastbeat Falafel
05. ADHD
06. 2020
07. Mustard Mucous
08. Infestis
09. Ancient Sun
10. Pure Disproportionate Black and White Nihilism
11. Étude n°120
12. Silence
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